White as Snow, Black as Night
by J. Miren
Summary: When her master has a vision that she will one day become a more powerful Sith than he, Rey is forced to flee her home on Exegol after he makes an attempt on her life. On the run, she finds companionship in the very assassins sent to kill her: the seven Knights of Ren. A Snow White retelling, TROS spoilers.
1. I: Egress

_**White as Snow, Black as Night**_

**I: Egress**

Shards of rock and bone rattled as the ground sundered beneath her feet, the platform shuddering as it began its descent into the underworld of Exegol. Every shallow breath that trickled past her teeth was a new sort of agony; bracing herself with her staff and biting back the whine that climbed up the length of her throat, Rey pressed her fingertips to the tender spot at her side. No doubt that her ribs were broken—she'd felt the crunch seconds before she drove her lightsaber through the pilot's chest, had doubled over in pain when she hurled herself into his seat, panting and wheezing as she fumbled with the unfamiliar controls of the Resistance ship. In that moment, the extent of her injuries and the shameful reality of her near defeat had not mattered. The only thought on her mind had been _home. _

A drop of rain splattered against her cheek, and she tipped her face up, squinting to peer through the pall of mist draped over the surface of the planet. A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, revealing the silhouettes of the Star Destroyers that had gathered high in the atmosphere. She tried to count how many there were—if only to distract herself from the piercing pain in her ribs—but lost track as she slipped further beneath the surface. One by one, they winked out like stars dying, and soon she was only focused on the tightness in her chest and the awful rasping of her labored breaths as the air grew thin and cold and stale.

Coming home felt like being buried alive—it always did. But she had come back anyways for the same reason that any wounded animal would—because she was in pain and she had nowhere else to go.

Her stomach roiled when the platform finally reached the bottom, the impact spooling up the length of her limbs. With a gasp, she lurched forward, bile rising in the back of her throat as a wave of white-hot pain bloomed in her side. Her knuckles were pale as she clung to her staff for support, wicking the sweat that had gathered on her forehead off with one palm and managing to stagger onto the solid ground.

"Hello." A little droid greeted and wheeled up to her, bumping its head against her calf like a cat.

Her body already so tender with pain, every brush of cool metal against her bare skin nearly unbearable, but still she forced herself to drop to her knees in front of the droid. Dented in some places and singed from blaster-fire in others, his conical head was almost in as poor of shape as she imagined herself to be. Wryly, she asked: "Didn't I tell you to stay out of trouble while I was gone?"

Evading answering, D-O rolled out of reach. If she had had the energy to spare, Rey might have laughed; one of these days, she would come back and find the droid in a pile of mangled parts. D-O wheeled off towards and hesitated at the narrowing of the cavern that led into the main wing of the Sith Temple, rocking back and forth on his single wheel impatiently.

"Go on, I'm right behind you." She managed a smile, but felt it twist into a grimace as she hauled herself back onto her feet, a groan strangling in the base of her throat.

"You're hurt." D-O observed with as much sympathy as a droid could muster—much more than she deserved, really.

He disappeared into the fissure between the rock, and slowly she trailed behind, limping as a fresh ache stirred in her knee. The shadows swallowed her up when she entered and plunged the world into darkness; she closed her eyes and surrendered to them, letting instinct and the faint whir of her droid's wheel guide her through the labyrinthine vasculature of the temple.

At the very least—she comforted herself as she walked, well aware that no one else would—she had not failed. No matter how many injuries she had sustained, how many men she had lost, how much she would eventually loathe herself for all the blood she spilled, she had fulfilled her master's orders and come back to Exegol alive. Broken bones and hearts could be healed, Stormtroopers replaced, but the life of his young apprentice, his _granddaughter_...

Her steps faltered.

No, troubling as it was, maybe that too was expendable in its own way.

The passage spit her out into an adjoining corridor, and when she opened her eyes, relief welled in her chest at the sight of her quarters. But no sooner than the yearning for bacta and a hot shower had overwhelmed her did D-O make a sharp turn around the corner.

"D-O?" She called, but the droid did not come back to her.

Frowning, she hobbled in the same direction with what little speed she could muster, using her staff as a crutch. Though the droid stopped and waited for her to catch up every so often, she soon lost track of him; when she came to a fork in the corridor and her little guide was still nowhere in sight, she cursed under her breath and went left, because she rarely ever did the right thing and wasn't about to start now.

Although the mystery had distracted her for a few precious moments, the pain in her side returned, fierce and demanding to be felt as it radiated throughout her abdomen. She slumped against the wall, her fingers digging into the jagged surface as she struggled to keep herself upright. Fatigue drooped from her eyelids and her lashes fluttered wildly as she labored to stay awake, the monochrome of shadows in the corridor melting into a disorienting mess of black before her eyes.

She needed to turn around and go back; following the droid on one of his many whims had been a complete mistake when she was already in such critical condition. But something deep within her urged, _keep going, _and she could not find the strength to say no.

Dazed, she pushed away from the wall and stumbled in the direction she believed D-O had gone, walking for what seemed like hours until finally she came upon something other than infinite darkness and could no longer tell if she had slipped out of the world and into a nightmare.

A door leading into one of the adjoining chambers had been left partially ajar, and a pale sliver of light slipped through the gap, flowing to the bend where the ground met the corridor wall and then climbing up it. But it was the hazy shadow that it tossed on the wall—the one of the Sith acolyte that stretched monstrous and menacing—that made her blanch. She shivered as its sibilant voice slithered up her spine and the words curled like smoke around her.

"Impossible, she is hardly more than a child. She cannot defeat you."

"I know what I have seen," her master's terrible voice stirred dread in the pits of her stomach, and with the same resolve that ordered the destruction of worlds and the enslavement of entire races across the galaxy, he vowed, "and she will be dead before such a nightmare is realized."

In the distance, D-O whistled in warning.

The weight of a blaster pressed against her spine.

Mourning was a luxury that she was rarely afforded—the despair of the betrayal rolled effortlessly off her shoulders like a robe shed to the floor. In its stead, indignation blazed in her chest as hellfire burned through everything—reason, compassion, _morality. _All that was left simmering in her breast was the hatred and the hurt. She bared her teeth, adrenaline momentarily erasing the pain as she whirled around and shoved the blaster out of the Stormtrooper's hand with her powers; it clanged against the wall, metal crumpling and crunching before falling into a ruined mess on the ground.

"You should have taken the shot when you had the chance." She hissed, and with another flourish of her hand sent the Stormtrooper's body hurtling in the direction of his weapon. A sickening crack pierced through the silence surrounding them as his body slammed against a protrusion of rock in the wall. Dust and rubble tumbled down from the ceiling, and blood welled in the angry fissure streaking across his body armor. His fingers twitched once, then went still.

Before her master could find her in the corridor and finish her himself, Rey was already running. Later, she might remark that it was really stumbling with speed and hurling her body forward in short bursts to cover distance, but it was as much of a run as she could muster in her present state. Still, retracing her steps felt impossible; she fell upon dead end after dead end, and when she finally staggered into the cavern that would lead her back to the surface, a pack of Stormtroopers was already waiting for her.

A blaster bolt whistled past her ear, and she ducked, her staff clattering to the ground at her feet. As another sailed her way, she fumbled to unclip her lightsaber from her belt, a rush of hope flooding her as she finally detached it and unfurled the double-edged weapon, the twin crimson blades roaring to life. Sparks crackled as she deflected the shot, and as she slowly settled into a clunky rhythm of combat—her broken ribs would be the end of her—she felt herself begin to slip into the seduction of the dark.

She cut through the Stormtroopers the same way that she had the Resistance fighters not hours before—with abandon and fury and the desire to _survive_. One by one they collapsed and she silently reveled in her destruction, but with every passing second she felt more and more as if she were moving underwater—every slash of her saber, every lunge, every block felt increasingly sluggish and clumsy.

When at last she had isolated a single trooper and the torment of her worsening injuries sobered her from the high of the dark, she collapsed onto her hands and knees, her lightsaber tumbling out of her grasp and rolling just out of reach. Panting, she strained to suppress the nausea—half from the pain and half from the mounting disgust for herself at what she had done.

What she would do.

Taking out a Sith apprentice—_the Emperor's _apprentice—was the kind of glory that could immortalize any soldier in the annals of history. She could feel him savoring it, drunk on the fantasy of escaping the mediocrity of his position, burning every last detail of defeating the woman into his pitiful mind—from the way the sickly pallor of her skin was almost translucent under the dim light of the cavern to how feeble her broken body looked at his feet. She could not continue on for much longer—not as her condition deteriorated by the second—and they both knew it.

But only she knew the lengths that she would go to in order to survive.

His body dropped to the ground with a strangled grunt and a heavy thud as she clenched her fist and crushed his windpipe.

She always hated how it felt in her hands, her stomach, her heart when it came to this; however small it was, the chance that someone could survive being stabbed by her saber or thrown from a great height was still there. Rey pried her fingertips from her palm, hissing as the pressure of her nails was replaced by the sting of broken flesh; droplets of blood beaded on the crescent-shaped wounds like rubies, and she smeared her palm against her thigh, momentarily unable to stomach the sight of blood on her hands, even if it was her own. There was no honor in dying this way, no honor in killing this way.

But valor and integrity were impossible luxuries for one who had always just been trying her hardest to survive.

Exhausted, she released a sharp exhale and felt as if she would collapse then and there, but she managed to claw her way to the platform, flopping onto her back and staring up as Exegol's sky appeared with a devastating slowness in the yawning maw that opened to the surface.

If she was lucky, the ship that she had commandeered from the Resistance pilot would still be there, waiting to whisk her away to a place in the galaxy where she hoped that her master would never be able to find her. If not...

Well, the temple had always felt like a tomb. It seemed only fitting that she might die there.

At last, when the platform reached the surface and she spotted the hull of the ship through the rain, she found the strength to rise onto her feet and lumber towards her salvation. The ramp lowered as she approached, clanging and squealing beneath her heavy footfalls as she clambered up it and into the cockpit. Water dripped at her feet and welled in the fissures in the cracked leather as she dropped into the pilot's seat and pried away the strands of hair that the rain had soldered to her forehead and her cheeks. Her fingers flitted over the controls, flipping switches and pressing buttons as she charted a course to a planet she vaguely remembered visiting to refuel at many years prior. Rain rapped against the viewport softly, and every so often she stole glances at the landing pad, relieved when it remained empty even as the ship strained to lift off from the ground.

Flying a ship away from Exegol had always felt nearly impossible, and this time was no different. As the wayward and spiteful gravity of the planet tugged at it, the ship tilted and lurched dangerously, the engine screaming as the craft struggled to take off. The winds that had rolled in and heralded the storm to come tossed her around with abandon, and she tightened her hold on the controls, gritting her teeth as if somehow steadying herself would steady the entire ship.

"Come on..." she pleaded and pushed the lever for the thrusters as far forward as they would go. All she had to do was leave the atmosphere, and then she was free. No more master, no more missions that always filled her with such an overwhelming sense of self-loathing. The engine sputtered, and her stomach lurched as the ship tipped forward and began to hurtle back towards the ground nose first; but moments later, the engine whined as it recovered power and the craft righted itself.

And with an ear-splitting _pop!, _the thrusters sent her ship hurtling into the stars.

* * *

He was not surprised when he received the summons to Exegol. The upper ranks of the First Order had been buzzing with the news of the betrayal for days, some indignant, others fascinated, and others still envious that the Emperor's illusive (and now, _elusive_) apprentice had pulled off an escape few dared try. Kylo Ren supposed that he could understand all of those feelings, had maybe even felt them himself in some shallow way when he first caught wind of the news, but he hadn't dwelled on it long enough to isolate his own attitude towards what the woman had done; how _he_ felt about things had never mattered to anyone anyways, and would not change the reality that he would be the one tasked to hunt her down.

As he navigated the labyrinth of the Sith Temple, with his Knights stalking just a few paces behind, he bristled at the new sort of silence that had seized hold of the underground. It had always been maddeningly quiet beneath the surface in a way that forced one to listen to every whisper of darkness in their mind because there was simply _nothing _else to hear. But now, even those voices had fallen silent; the entire underworld was holding its breath.

"Kylo Ren," the Emperor's amusement and disdain enveloped him as he entered the throne room. His features screwing into a scowl beneath his mask, Ren approached and kneeled before him, head bowed in a show of supplication; behind, the Knights of Ren followed in suit.

He braced himself for whatever taunting and torment the Emperor might unleash upon him, his fingers tightening into a fist, his lungs arresting a breath, but it did not come.

"My apprentice has betrayed me. You will take your Knights, find her, and end her." Were the Emperor's terse orders.

Rarely did Ren linger in the details; knowing what had happened, what had brought them all to this point in time, would not change that in days to come this woman would be dead and that anything he might remember of her would eventually be subsumed under the indiscriminate death that seemed to follow wherever he went.

Still, he wondered what kind of person she was to dare betray the Emperor, knowing that his wrath could shake even the farthest stars, that she could not possibly run from him forever.

_What a_ _fool._

But his heart still twisted with jealousy and grief as the Emperor bade him to rise.

"It will be done."

* * *

**Author's note: **While this isn't my first stab at writing fanfic, it_ is_ my first time sharing online in many years. With that being said, if you have made it this far, I really appreciate that you took time out of your day to read the beginning of this tale and hope that you stick around for future installments if you enjoyed it. If you have any comments you'd like to share, I'd love to read them. I'll see you soon with chapter two! :)


	2. II: Mercy

_**White as Snow, Black as Night**_

**II: Mercy**

He was running through the forest again.

Sometimes when he had this dream, he was running away—splashing through shallow streams and trampling through tangled brush, the distant sound of his uncle's voice calling his name barely rising above that of his own gasping breaths. _Ben. _The word racketed in his mind, and the desperation with which his uncle said it almost made him turn around and go back. Almost. But then the image of Luke Skywalker's face enveloped by the sinister green glow of his weapon's blade surfaced in his mind, and with a cry that ached with devastation more than anger, he ran faster.

Other times when he had this dream, he was the one giving chase_. _There was no longer anyone to call out for him, anyone who remembered his true name or dared speak it if they did—he'd long since made sure of it. Instead, hunger sang in his blood and clawed in his stomach, fierce and insatiable as it always was; through the Force, he could feel the gentle tremor of anxiety and exertion as his prey fled from him, and Kylo Ren savored it as he ran and ran and ran. Slipping beneath archways of branches entwined and vaulting over felled logs, he pursued his prize until his path brought him to a stream that meandered through the center of the forest. On the other side, a Resistance fighter aimed a blaster at him, finger quivering on the trigger. As his lightsaber crackled to life at his side, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the water; lit in crimson, a monster of stygian and silver stared up at him through the rippled surface. And though he met its gaze, he thought little of it as he trampled through the water to close the divide, and the image shattered into hundreds of droplets beneath his feet.

Now, he was running through the forest, but everything had changed; a thready whisper of a pulse reached out to him, and he was no longer the proud hunter that he had been for so long. His chest was tight with an exertion and a dread that forced every breath out as soon as it entered. The dearth of air made his stomach roil with nausea, his legs burn like he'd dipped them in the lava flows on Mustafar, but he kept running despite it all.

What drove him on was not a fear nor a hunger.

It was a desperation.

At last, as the forest around him began to blur into stars and shadows, a weightlessness numbing his extremities and rising up to his head, he burst from the forest with a loud thrashing of branches.

A few meters away, the wreckage of an escape pod burned.

Durasteel groaned and shrieked and warped beneath an unseen grip as he grabbed hold of the top half of the pod and ripped it from its hinges. With a loud clang, the ruined metal fell to the ground beside the pod, transparisteel and brush crunching beneath its weight. On unsteady legs, he surged forward, vaguely aware that he had removed and tossed his mask aside, his lightsaber dropping to the ground and him to his knees in front of the pod.

Slumped forward, the pod's single occupant was still secured to her seat by the straps crossing over her abdomen. Her head hung limply, chin tucked against her chest where the blood dribbling from her lips had crusted and left a dark stain. _Resistance, _he noted the symbol emblazoned above the left breast pocket of her jumpsuit. _Wait, n__o, _his eyes slid down the length of her body; that the fabric slumped off her shoulders and gathered in the wrong places was enough to betray that it wasn't hers at all.

Even through the leather of his gloves, he could feel the coldness of her skin when he cupped her cheek and gently tipped her head back. Blanched but mottled with purple and blue, it was the shade of someone who was more dead than alive, and that her pulse was so faint that he could no longer tell if it was really there or just a trick of the wind was proof enough. With his free hand, he reached past her and unfastened the straps. Unceremoniously, she fell forward into his arms, and he caught her, half dragging and half carrying her away from the wreckage just in time for a loud _bang! _to echo in the night as the flames roared higher and swallowed the wreckage whole. Heat bloomed against his back, but he didn't turn around.

Finally, when he felt that he had put enough distance between them and the inferno, his strength began to crumble; the weight of her body fought against him, and he went back down to the ground with her, flopping onto his side to absorb most of the impact. Shock rattled his joints, and he tasted blood on his tongue near the now-tender spot where it had caught between his teeth. Lying across his midsection, her body trembled with a weak shiver, and he awkwardly tugged his cloak off his shoulders and out from beneath him, draping it over her instead.

Exhausted and on the edge of delirium, he listened to the sound of fire crackling and metal shuddering as the flames chewed through the debris, his arms around the woman on top of him. Above, the sky was a starless expanse—so empty and dark that he hardly noticed the moment when his eyes closed and sleep overtook him.

And like a scavenger hoarding its treasure, he held onto her as he fell into darkness.

* * *

He hurtled up in bed, the top of his head grazing the underside of Vicrul's bunk; it took two moments too many for him to realize that the shouts echoing in the room were his own. At his waist, his bedsheets had pooled into a wrinkled mess, and he shoved them aside, kicking them to the foot of the bed as if they had personally offended him. Sweat clung to him like a second skin, and his chest rose and fell rapidly as he labored for breaths, inhales interrupting exhales as he scrambled to find some coherent rhythm, eyes scanning the room for any signs of a fire or a forest or the woman buried beneath his cloak.

From the opposite wall, the rasp and rustle of sheets drew his attention. His wandering eyes met ones of jade-green peering up at him through a tangle of red hair; he and Cardo locked gazes for a fraction of a second before the man flopped on his other side and pulled his blanket up over the curve of his shoulder. Though he tried to even his breaths to a rhythm that mimicked that of sleep, they were both acutely aware that the Knight was still awake, half curious and half unsettled by what had just happened. And he wasn't the only one; in the bunk above, Vicrul had stopped tossing, and in the bunk below, Ushar's breath halted mid-snore.

There were few things about his Star Destroyer that he preferred over the _Night Buzzard, _but for a moment he would have traded anything to be in his private quarters, away from the judgment but mostly the concern (which was infinitely _worse_ in Ren's opinion) of others. Here, in the belly of the _Night Buzzard, _when he woke shouting and disoriented, suffocated by his own anxiety and the silent sympathy of the other Knights..._that _reminded him too much of how things had once been, when they were younger, had shared a room on a different planet and called a different man master.

The metallic tang of blood still lingered on his tongue, and when he swallowed his throat felt like it was full of sand. Tugging on the pants that he kept folded and tucked beside his pillow, he swung his legs over the side of his bed and dropped to the ground. Against his bare soles, the floor was cold and solid and familiar in a way that he only appreciated when his entire world was upended. Shaking his head, as if he could clear away the vestiges of the dream that still lingered, he padded over to the door. It slid open, and he stepped out into the main area of the ship, yawning into his hand.

"…the best bet's probably Cerosha. They shot out one of her engines here, and then she made the jump to hyperspace, which means that she probably ended up somewhere _here _when she abandoned ship."

A few paces away, the door to the cockpit was open, and the top of Kuruk's helmet rose above the backrest of the pilot's seat. Beside him, Ap'lek traced the apprentice's possible route with a gloved finger and reasoned through it aloud between sips of caf. In the doorway, Trudgen leaned, polishing the death trooper's helmet that he had repurposed into his own all those years ago until the surface gleamed like obsidian. None of them looked up as Ren passed, though he knew that they were just as on edge as the others; he didn't bother saying anything to them either.

When he shuffled into the 'fresher, the lights flickered on to greet him, and he locked the door behind him. Turning the faucet on, he scooped water into his hands, gulped down a handful, and then splashed his face with the rest, unbothered by how the excess dribbled from the corners of his lips, cooled and gathered along the line of his jaw.

_It was a nightmare, _he tried to console himself as his breaths fell shallow, remembering the weight of her body on his. The metal was cool against his palms as he pitched forward and gripped both sides of the sink basin, dread creeping through his veins and pooling in the base of his stomach, heavy as lead. _It was a nightmare—no more real than the one about Luke Skywalker. _

But that _had_ been real—once.

And in some strange way, he had the feeling that this one was too.

* * *

Still heavy with fatigue, her eyelids fluttered open and closed again in a series of false starts, the pressure of a yawn welling deep in her throat. Rey wriggled her toes, flexed her stiff fingers, and basked in the delicious heat that seemed to envelop her body in a tight embrace. The pain in her side had ebbed into a light pressure, the ache in her knee a dull needling. Her eyes fell closed again, and she relaxed into the sensation of weightlessness, the warmth sublimating the tension in her body. It felt like she was sinking in honey, drowning in euphoria.

_Falling..._

Just on the edge of sleep, her stomach lurched and she came crashing back into her body with a fierce jolt. Shock rattled in her skull and along the line of her jaw when she bit down and her teeth collided with a hard object; startled, her eyes snapped open, lips loosening around the breathing apparatus in her mouth with a shout. Though the thickness of the bacta (that's what it had to be, right? Nothing else in the galaxy was this thick and slimy.) and the curve of the tank bent the light in strange and blinding ways, she could see enough of the medbay beyond to recognize that it was _not _the one she visited on Exegol.

Which meant that, while the Stormtroopers her master had sent after her hadn't succeeded in capturing her after all, someone else had.

Her hands flew out in front of her, one splayed against the transparisteel and the other balled into a fist. Thick as honey in a way that was no longer pleasant but cloying instead, the bacta seemed to actively fight her every move; by the time she had reeled her fist back and threw it forward in a punch, it bumped softly, harmlessly off the inner surface. A growl rumbled low in her throat where it stayed, any sounds she tried to make stifled by the breathing apparatus. Knowing what she would find, her gaze still flitted up to the top of the tank, disappointed but not surprised to see that it was sealed shut. She'd have to find another way out after all. Fast—before her captor returned.

Fixing her eyes back on the walls of the tank, she braced her palms against and leaned all of her weight into it; tension built in her upper arms, but it did not so much as even bend or budge—not that she had expected it to. Not yet at least.

She closed her eyes and found a darkness that rolled eternal and indefinite, followed it all the way back into her memories of Exegol until she was standing in the heart of the Sith Temple, staring up at her master for the first time. Her stomach churned as she recalled the revolting, milky-gray shade of his skin, the way his eyes looked like marbles of fogged glass as they fixed on her.

_Unlimited power. Through the dark side of the Force. _

It was the promise that he'd made to her when he first christened her 'apprentice' and perhaps the only true thing that he'd ever said to her. Hardly five years old, she hadn't understood or cared what it meant, had latched onto a different promise, _a lie_, instead.

Hatred writhed in her chest as it replayed in her mind, and a sharp tremor rippled through the bacta and across the surface of the transparisteel. Hairline cracks followed in its wake, widening the further up and up they climbed along the walls of the tank. As pressure swelled against the inside like a wave cresting, she tried to gather the hate back up and vault it in her heart, but her blood carried it farther and farther away until her whole body was shaking with fury.

The walls bowed outwards and shattered with a deafening crash.

Surging forward, a torrent of bacta and transparisteel shards swept her up along with it and hurled her to the ground. Breath slammed out of her lungs as she landed on her side and skidded to the center of the room, the impact still reverberating in her bones and teeth as she slid to a stop. Coughing and sputtering, she shivered from the sudden cold and the growing ache in her body—both all the more agonizing as she recalled the warmth and the weightlessness from minutes before.

All at once, a cacophony of competing alarms cried out in the medbay. Gritting her teeth, Rey clamped her hands over her ears to block out the shrill noise, attempting to stagger to her feet to no avail; her heels were still slick with bacta and the vicious glare of the lights overhead was nauseating and disorienting, forcing her back to the ground again and again.

By the time she had resigned herself to crawling out of sheer desperation, she found herself staring at an old woman who had skidded to a stop in the now-open doorway.

"_Stars,_" The datapad she held tumbled to the mess of liquid and shards pooled at her feet. She hesitated only for a moment before rushing to Rey's side, her boots trampling and crunching through the slush. Dropping to her knees, she reached for Rey, but the younger woman evaded her touch, falling onto her backside and scrambling away.

"You're okay. You're safe." The woman raised her hands in front of her and remained in place.

"Where am I?" Rey glared at her, but had stopped backing away.

It hadn't gone unnoticed, and a small smile rose on the corners of the woman's lips. "Cerosha. I saw your pod crash and figured you weren't interested in becoming supper for the things that live in the woods."

"And now...?" She swallowed, her heartbeats slowing and the tension in her body evaporating, fearing how much she felt inclined to, _wanted _to trust this woman and her warm smile even though she knew nothing about her.

"Well," her eyes twinkled, and with a slight nod of her head, she said, "First, I'd like to take care of that."

A rivulet of blood flowed from where Rey's palm was pressed to the ground. The faint stinging that she had ignored during their exchange suddenly became all she could feel; when she pried her hand away from the floor, she balked at the shard of transparisteel embedded in the center of her palm.

"May I?" The woman gestured to her hand, and Rey remained silent, which was invitation enough. Drawing a synthskin patch from the pocket of her long coat, she closed the gap between them. Her hands were soft and warm as she took Rey's injured hand into her own.

"Thank you," Rey murmured as the woman worked the shard from her palm with an incredible tenderness, humming softly to herself all the while. The words felt strange and clunky on her tongue, but still she felt that it was the right thing to say. And when the woman finished and withdrew her touch without lingering a second longer than she needed to, it occurred to Rey that she _was _grateful, even if she wasn't entirely sure to what extent for yet.

"Sadly, I wasn't able to rescue any of your things. By the time I made it to the crash, the entire pod was up in flames, but fortunately for us you'd managed to crawl away from the worst of it." She smiled like she was genuinely glad that she had survived, and any of the warmth that had lingered in Rey cooled into guilt and dread.

Her lightsaber hadn't made it out of the wreckage, then. Which meant that the woman had no idea who she had saved, what kind of terrible misfortune she had just wrought not only on the galaxy but also on herself.

"Hold on—actually, I do have one thing of yours." She snapped her fingers, and the sound was enough to startle Rey back into concentration, her palms prickling with sweat and anxiety twisting in her stomach like a knife as she imagined the next words that would come out of the woman's mouth. But no sooner than she braced herself for them, did she say something different entirely.

"Your cloak." She frowned when Rey stared at her in confusion. "The one that you were wrapped in? It seemed rather large, but I figured that it must have been important to you if you dragged it with you when you crawled out of the pod." She paused for a moment, her dark eyes expectant, but Rey remained silent. "No? Well, that's all right. No use in worrying about something as silly as cloak when you've just woken up after that ordeal."

Rising from the floor, she dusted her palms against her thighs and stuck a hand out to Rey. "Now, I was just about to make dinner. Think you're ready for some food?"

* * *

**Author's note: **At one point, when my draft for chapter two reached 7,000 words, I saved and titled it "holy heck this is a bloated mess of a chapter", and then eventually did the sensible thing by splitting it in two; I wish I had gotten to that point two weeks ago rather than this week so that a whole month wouldn't have passed, but such is life. All of the love and thanks to everyone who read, commented, favorited, and followed this story (and who came back for chapter two!). Since chapter three just needs some minor polishing, I should have an update for you all soon!


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